Technical Field
This application relates generally to videoconferencing utilizing a browser.
Brief Description of the Related Art
Real-time communications (e.g., videoconferencing, shared document editing, screen sharing, and the like) over the Internet have been a part of our daily lives at work and at home. That said, many of the existing technical solutions are not interoperable, and there are still difficult technical problems (e.g., NAT traversal) that can stymie direct peer-to-peer connections, thus dictating the use of relays to ensure connectivity. When relays are overloaded, call quality suffers. Further, multi-party video conferencing typically requires a separate connection for each pair of users, and this approach does not scale.
WebRTC, an Internet standard, was created to make videoconferencing and point-to-point data transfer easier to implement. In particular, WebRTC (which stands for Web Real Time Communications) seeks to take the most critical elements of video chat and move them to one of the most commonly used tools for accessing the Internet, namely, a web browser. WebRTC is supported with plugins by both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. It allows the browser to access the client machine's camera and microphone, provides a method for establishing a direct connection between two users' browser and to use that connection to send audio and video, and it provides a method for sending arbitrary data streams across a connection. WebRTC further mandates that all data is encrypted.
While WebRTC provides significant advantages, it does not itself address the scaling challenges associated with connectivity across NAT and multi-party conferencing. Thus, for example, a relay infrastructure (using TURN) is needed to establish connections between two peers behind NATs, and building a robust and scalable relay infrastructure is challenging. Additionally, multi-user video conferencing over WebRTC requires full mesh connectivity between all users; that is, a separate connection must be established between each pair of users. Each user needs to upload their video (and other data) multiple times—once for each peer—and the resources required grow in a way proportional to the square of the number of users, which does not scale. These issues are not limited to WebRTC; indeed, existing, dedicated video conferencing solutions struggle with the same problems. For example, Microsoft's Skype relays are often overloaded, significantly impacting the quality of Skype calls that cannot use a direct peer-to-peer connection. Another common solution, LifeSize, needs the same full-mesh connectivity described above, which severely limits the number of different remote sites that can participate in one meeting.
The remains a need to enhance the performance, reliability and scalability of WebRTC and to provide a ubiquitous platform for real-time collaboration.